Series2vec: similarity-based self-supervised representation learning for time series classification

Abstract

We argue that time series analysis is fundamentally different in nature to either vision or natural language processing with respect to the forms of meaningful self-supervised learning tasks that can be defined. Motivated by this insight, we introduce a novel approach called Series2Vec for self-supervised representation learning. Unlike the state-of-the-art methods in time series which rely on hand-crafted data augmentation, Series2Vec is trained by predicting the similarity between two series in both temporal and spectral domains through a self-supervised task. By leveraging the similarity prediction task, which has inherent meaning for a wide range of time series analysis tasks, Series2Vec eliminates the need for hand-crafted data augmentation. To further enforce the network to learn similar representations for similar time series, we propose a novel approach that applies order-invariant attention to each representation within the batch during training. Our evaluation of Series2Vec on nine large real-world datasets, along with the UCR/UEA archive, shows enhanced performance compared to current state-of-the-art self-supervised techniques for time series. Additionally, our extensive experiments show that Series2Vec performs comparably with fully supervised training and offers high efficiency in datasets with limited-labeled data. Finally, we show that the fusion of Series2Vec with other representation learning models leads to enhanced performance for time series classification. Code and models are open-source at https://github.com/Navidfoumani/Series2Vec